Saturday, September 12, 2009

VicTORI!

What a week!!!My friends all think I'm mad but... I saw Tori in concert 3 times! I'm a groupie!But the thing is...you just have to go and see her more than once. She varies the setlist every night, so the thought of missing out on a fave song is unbearable!!! I mean, she does around 5 songs the same each night (Cornflake Girl, Precious Thing, opener Give, closer Strong Black Vine, and stomper Big Wheel)

Concert #1 - up in Birmingham. I had to see her as she was playing the Birmingham Symphony Hall, an absolutely gorgeous venue that I'd prayed she would play one day. Very intense...very scary...not knowing quite what to expect... Audience was a bit dull but eventually warmed up... Tori said she was sad that her daughter had to go back to school and then launched into Leaving On A Jet Plane. Playboy Mommy, Siren, Cloud on Your Tongue, Sister Janet, and Your Cloud were all amazing, and Take to the Sky - with I Feel the Earth Move inserted in the middle - was a true stomper. Strong Black Vine was funny as her ear piece fell out and she improv'd a new mini-song about it 'I can't heeear' hehe. A great show.

Concert #2 - London Hammersmith Apollo. A strange experience because I was with 2 friends, one who had never seen her before - so I was nervous and wanted him to like it! It was a great show again, but not as good as #3 (I won't tell them that!). I felt a bit unrelaxed...plus she repeated a couple of songs from the Brum concert that were a bit weak live. However, there were some fab songs - Space Dog, Pancake, Icicle, Jamaica Inn, Cooling, and Lady in Blue which was just 10 out of 10. Big Wheel was hiliarous because she lost track of the countdown-handclaps so had to redo it over and over again hehe. One problem with this gig was the audience - I don't know what the hell was up with them getting up and down up and down for beers all the time.

Concert #3 - London Hammersmith Apollo again (zzz dull place!). This was amazing... Tori's not the same as she used to be. I've seen her on every tour she's done. She started off chatty and funny in the early days, and full of improvisations and innovation in her songs, but over the years, the anecdotes and chats have died down (I guess you run out of things to say?). But she seemed to connect more with us than she usually does these days, and there was a lot of energy in the concert. Also, the setlist was totally different from the previous day (apart from the five 'standards') which was really appreciated. She looked stunning in a gold outfit.Some great songs including Marys of the Sea (worked so well live), Welcome to England (I saw this solo at the Savoy but it was great with the band), Putting the Damage on, Hotel, Body and Soul, Tori does a solo bit in the middle, and this one was phenomenal. Two truly classic songs from Boys for Pele, Mr Zebra and Not the Red Baron, and new song Ophelia which was so fresh, and just reinvograted my Tori stalker-fandom. Reminded me of how fantastic she really can be in concert.Precious Things this tour was amazing - she's really played with the structure of the song to include dramatic pauses and kind of a remix-y vibe to it, where she doesn't sing all the lyrics properly. The song that impressed me the most this tour though was Strong Black Vine - which she played each night, and which slowly crept up on me. There's a fabulous improv thing in the middle where she just sings 'She is a mother-fuckeeeer' for about 5 minutes! Amazing!The audience behaved a bit better in the 2nd London concert. I'd actually emailed the Hammersmith Apollo to complain, and they seemed a lot more on the ball where it came to audience distractions and people filming the show - altho sadly this backfired as for most of the concert all i could see was the doddery old security guard running around. Also there seemed to be about 4 guys who were incontinent and kept going to the toilet...Anyway, roll on the next tour!!! More!!!

4 comments:

is oh-tah a stalker or something? i just got in from a little japanese party actually - invited by my Sensei we had sushi and...dozu/jozu? some of the girls put kimono's on and a guy put his robes on.

tori's sets were about 2 hours - on at 8.40ish off at 10.40ish she used to do loads of encores but not any more - just one encore this tour with maybe 2 songs. she has to go off stage otherwise she'll get fined and have to pay extra!

supporting act was 'One Eskimo'. they were okay, kind of like a hippy/young Coldplay, but after a while it dawned on me that the singer (who bounced up and down throughout the concert like a mental patient) sounded like Phil Collins.

Party sounds like fun. One of the things I enjoyed about living in Japan was going out on a summer's evening and seeing people chatting away on their mobile phones while dressed in traditional light summer wear -- jinbei and yukata. So emblematic of Japan to me, that un-self-conscious mixing of the old with the new.